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Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC. The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal , The Hill , and Politico , comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the "complex and significant transaction" could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms." Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports. The response of groups like Free Press was expected in its anger, but not without merit.
After approving NBC buyout, FCC Commish becomes Comcast lobbyist
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So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging.
Theory of mind and the belief in God. - By Jesse Bering - Slate Magazine
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes | Julian Jaynes Society
"When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence..." - John Updike, in The New Yorker "This book and this man's ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole shelves of books obsolete." - William Harrington, in Columbus Dispatch "Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness , I myself feel something like Keats' Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of Darwin or Freud.